Fun Fact Friday: Klay en fuego

Klay Thompson dropped an NBA-record 14 three-pointers on the Chicago Bulls last week. That’s a fact. Of course, lurking beneath the surface is a goldmine of much more fun facts.

1. Klay and the Wreck-and-Rest

Thompson’s night against Chicago confirmed his status as the master of what I’d like to call the Wreck-and-Rest game. (The Scorch-and-Sit? The Burn-and-Bench?) That is: Thompson goes so deeply en fuego in the early portions of so many games, building such a huge lead, that he buys himself and his fellow starters a chilled-out fourth quarter on the bench. You could argue that this kind of game, no matter the point total, is more valuable than a regular ol’ 50-point-night in the midst of the regular season grind.

Klay’s 52-point game against Chicago is the second-most points that anybody has ever scored in 30 minutes or less — and it was only a 27-minute night for Thompson. The leader? A knockdown shooter named Klay Thompson, who obliterated the Pacers for 60 points in 29 minutes in December 2016.

There are only two other times a player has topped 50 points in less than 30 minutes. They both happened for the Trail Blazers within two weeks last season, first by CJ McCollum (also against Fred Hoiberg’s Bulls), and then by Damian Lillard.

Klay is the king of the upper end of the history of Wreck-and-Rest games. In reality, scoring at least 30 points in 30 minutes or less and getting the win is a historically dominant type of night. It happens more rarely than you might think: Michael Jordan did it just 14 times. He’s been eclipsed by our new all-time leader, Steph Curry, with 18 total games.

2. But can Klay match Ben Gordon?

I really don’t want to take away from Klay’s outrageous night, because it is historically great. But I just want to add: now that coaches and front offices actually encourage shooting from deep, this record for most 3’s in a game is falling all the time, and probably will continue to be pushed over the next few years. There have been 36 games in league history when a player has made 10 or more 3-pointers — 16 of them have happened in the last five regular seasons.

To me, the more elusive record is quickly becoming: most made 3-pointers in a game without a miss from deep. This record is more elusive because it is, yes, more trivial. As players are encouraged to shoot more 3s, a miss on a reasonable deep shot is an acceptable outcome, even as far as the front office is concerned. (And the front office is the one cutting the checks.) On his big night this week, Klay missed 10 3-pointers. Still, he locked in an astronomical 1.75 points per possession across the 24 times he attempted a 3-pointer. Putting together a heat check that holds up for the entire night is going to be increasingly difficult.

There is currently a three-way tie on the leaderboard of the no-miss 3-pointer game, at 9-for-9. Latrell Sprewell was the first to get there, for the Knicks in 2003 — not bad at all for a career 33.7 percent shooter. The record has since been tied twice, both times by Ben Gordon. He did it first for the Bulls in 2006 and then for the Pistons in 2012, with Detroit actually losing the game. (Gordon would only start five more games in his whole career after that second explosion.) Nobody this year has done better than 4-for-4.

3. Golden State plus-minus dominance

At first glance, it seems like there have to be some other small records on the Warriors’ side of that insane box score over the Bulls. Is Golden State’s bananas 142 Offensive Rating a record? Nope: there are somehow 80 games where a team has played with a more efficient offense, with the seemingly unbeatable record being set by…the 1997-98 Clippers, who won 17 whole games that year.

Is Kevin Durant’s incredible plus-minus of +45 in only 28 minutes a record? Even though plus-minus has only been recorded since 2000-01, that’s not even a top-25 game. The pace is being set by Luc Mbah a Moute, who got an insane +57 in just 26 minutes off the bench last November.

This is getting a bit desperate, but: what about Andre Iguodala’s cameo in Klay’s monster game? In only seven minutes, without attempting a shot (but distributing four assists), Iguodala went +16. Surely that’s the best-ever plus-minus performance in 10 minutes or less?

It’s not. The record, amazingly, was set by a different member of the Warriors in this same week. Three days before blowing the doors off of the Bulls, the Warriors demolished the Knicks, and Alfonzo McKinnie went off for +26 in just under nine minutes.

In just 106 minutes this year, McKinnie has gone a total of +52, which is a top-30 mark in the entire league. That’s a pretty good outcome for McKinnie considering that, as a college senior, he averaged 21 minutes and eight points a game for the not-quite-a-powerhouse University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Good luck to Patrick McCaw and his attempts to negotiate his way back onto this team now.

4. Now Trevor Ariza wishes he were Alfonzo McKinnie

Last week I missed a tidbit from Nikola Jokic’s unprecedented perfect triple-double game: one of his opponents, Trevor Ariza, got absolutely scorched with a -47 plus-minus in just 29 minutes. This is, amazingly, not a record. While Ariza’s night is tied for fourth-worst of the century, nobody has gotten within nine points of the leader. That would be an astonishing -57 night from Manny Harris in January 2011, when he was left out for 41 minutes as the Cavaliers got stomped by the Lakers, 112-57.

The fun fact here isn’t just about Ariza’s one night. The fun fact is that many of Ariza’s teammates (plus other, now-departed members of the modern Suns) are all over this list. Last October, Eric Bledsoe and T.J. Warren opened up the season by going -41 and -42. Last February, Warren went -48 in one game, and then Marquese Chriss and Josh Jackson went -46 and -47 in a different game in the same week.

Out of the 91 games this century where a player went -40 or worse, the Ryan McDonough-era Suns have contributed nine of those games. Which, yes, the Suns have been pretty bad for a few years now. But these Suns are hardly noteworthy when it comes to looking at all the truly bad teams of this century. Phoenix’s worst record, last year, was 21-61, and dozens of teams have finished with fewer wins than that. Still, it looks like Phoenix holds a unique place as the team that folds earliest and folds hardest when it is just not their night.

5. What’s up with the 2016 Draft?

The Halloween deadline for third- and fourth-year player options is a supremely underrated part of the NBA’s transactions calendar. Sometimes with these young players, it’s hard to tell if their lack of minutes comes from still developing a promising, raw, skill-set — or if the player is simply a bust. On All Hallows Eve, teams are forced to give us, the public, a truthful indication of whether or not things have been at all developing in the right way. In general, it looks like teams are pressing the eject button sooner and sooner: we saw 2017 first-rounders Justin Patton (drafted by the Timberwolves at No. 16) and Tyler Lydon (Nuggets, No. 24) get their third-year options declined before either player could hit double-digit total minutes in the league.

What this week really showed, though, was that the hyped-at-the-time 2016 Draft could actually go down as one of the worst in history. Even before this season, three of the 30 first-round picks had already been cut: Brice Johnson (Clippers, No. 25), Wade Baldwin (Memphis, No. 17), and lottery pick Georgios Papagiannis (Kings, No. 13). They are about to be joined in the driftless style of free agency by a half-dozen players who saw their options get declined: Furkan Korkmaz (Sixers, No. 26), Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot (Sixers, now with Thunder, No. 24), Malachi Richardson (Kings, now with Raptors No. 22), Henry Ellenson (Pistons, No. 18), and a double-whammy of Suns lottery picks in Marquese Chriss (now with Rockets, No. 8) and Dragan Bender (No. 4).

So there are a lot of now-busted experiments from 2016 when GM’s tried to shoot their shot. But the issues go even deeper, as many of the players who have stayed on the same team are still not contributing positively anyhow. Really: beyond Ben Simmons, things are looking pretty dire. Only five players in the entire draft have a positive career Box Plus-Minus, and that includes the 38 career games from Ante Zizic. The other players are Simmons, Dejounte Murray, Pascal Siakam, and Jakob Poeltl. In other words: holy crap did the Raptors nail it.

Is it possible that this kind of thing happens to every draft after just a year or two? Could it be true that players just need more time to build positive-BPM seasons as veterans in order to outweigh their play as rookies, which probably just wasn’t very good?

It’s possible — but it doesn’t look like it. The 2017 draft has nine of these players after their rookie years plus a few weeks, with several players — Jordan Bell, Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, OG Anunoby — already coming through with significant playoff roles. The 2015 draft has eleven of these players, with Terry Rozier and Kristaps Porzingis (!) about to jump into the positive after early-career inefficiencies.

What about the 2013 Draft, which would be headlined by No. 1 pick Anthony Bennett, and preemptively roasted as one of the worst ever? It has 17 BPM-positive players, including MVP-candidate unicorn Giannis Antetokounmpo.

What about the 2000 draft, which has long been identified as the very worst draft ever? Its biggest star — who is either Mike Miller, Hedo Turkoglu, or Jamal Crawford — can’t hold a candle to Simmons. Still, the class has somehow produced seven BPM-positive players.

I went all the way back to 1973 Draft, the first rookie class to play while play-by-play data was tracked, meaning BPM could be retroactively calculated for their careers: the 2016 Draft is in dead last. The reputation of the whole class now rests on Caris LeVert (-0.7 career BPM), Malcolm Brogdon (-0.7), and Jamal Murray (-1.1) to stick around long enough to flip into the positive.

Stats accurate as of games played on October 31. Big ups to Basketball-Reference.